Exchange 2003 IS backup - hangs periodically

[Thomas_Buhr_Hau]

Hello,

For several months now I have been trouble shooting a setup where Backup Exec 2012 SBE (fully patched) backups a remote Exchange 2003 SP2 Information Store directly to tape.

The BE 2012 media server is installed on W2008 R2
The Exchange 2003 SP2 is installed on a Windows 2003 SP2 DC (I know - not best practice - but setup is similar to SBS 2003)

Only the information store is selected for the job and AOFO is deselected.

The backup job is the 1st out of 3 jobs. And it will usually run successful for 5-6 days. Then it hangs with status "Active". And the Backup services seems stuck. I am not able to cancel the Exchange job through the GUI - and it never processes any bytes when this occurs. You will have to use task manager on the media server to end the BE processes - and restart services. After manually re-starting the backup jobs it will run without any problems for 5-6 days. Some times it helps to stop the remote agent on the exchange server - and the job will fail........ I have tried to remove and reinstall the agent - but no luck.

Acronis Echo Image server is installed on the Exchange server - could it be messing with VSS and making the Exchange backup to fail periodically??

Symantec advised me backing up Exchange job to disk and then dupl. to tape. But it gives me similar periodic problems + cataloging process hanging.

Originally we had BE installed on the Exchange server. I moved BE it to a W2008 R2 server to see if it would make any difference. But no.. same problem - and always with the Exchange job. I have tried to change the order of the jobs - and it will always get stuck in the very beginning of the Exchange job "Status = "Active"...

Symantec has not been able to help me.

BE 2014 is not an option = no support for Exchange 2003.

Has anyone experienced anything like this?

Regards

Thomas Buhr

[CraigV]

Hi Thomas,

Having to stop BE by killing the processes is an old bug...BE is waiting for something to start/complete before it kills the services with a restart, and it never seems to happen.

Running 2 different backup softwae products on the same server isn't really recommended, and it can mess with 1, or both of them.

When this happens again, open a command prompt and type: vssadmin list writers and check to see if all the writers are stable. Then try correlate this with the Acronis backup product to see if it ran at a similar time to BE to maybe cause this.

Also make sure that no maintenance tasks are running at the time of the backup failure...if so, schedule the backup of Exchange for a different time.

Thanks!

[Thomas_Buhr_Hau]

Hi again,
 

Frustation continues..

I've uninstalled Acronis Image Echo Server from the Exchange 2003 + reboot.

Then had 9 successfull backups until today where the Information Store backup job hung at "Active".

Again the job never really began processing - well the tape was loaded and overwritten - but no bytes transfered. It's just stuck there... at "Active".

I tried to stop the BE Remote Agent on the Exchange server - but its seems hung. Had to kill the Remote Agent task on the Exchange server using Task Manager. This made the job cancel it self with the error "Backup- \\server01.domainname.local\Microsoft Information Store\First Storage GroupV-79-57344-65298 - The Exchange Store service is not responding. Backup set canceled.".

So it seems that the communication between the Remote Agent on the Exchange server and the media server stops / fails? Or The Remote Agent comes in unresponsive state?

What could interfere with the Remote Agent on Windows 2003 / Exhange 2003 SP2?
I have tried to re-install the Remote Agent on the Exchange server several times.
Backup job is not shceduled to run while Exchange maintenance or Shadow Copy is active.
 

Regards
Thomas